Fiction.

A.s. Byatt's Victoriana

Questions Of Passion, Faith And Science In 19th Century England

June 13, 1993|By Reviewed by Joseph Coates, Tribune book critic.

Angels and Insects

By A.S. Byatt

Random House, 337 pages, $21

With these two novellas, Antonia Susan Byatt expands the Victorian beachhead she established with the phenomenally successful "Possession" of 1990, this time fully possessing the period in a way not possible in that novel because half its focus was on the 20th Century people and events that paralleled the story of her doomed poet/lovers of the previous century.

Byatt here reverses the thematic direction of "Possession," which implicitly sought to refresh the modern wasteland by reclaiming for it some of the passionate eroticism and humane values of the Victorian era, besieged though they were by the scientific industrialism that would lay waste the 20th.

In "Angels and Insects" Byatt comes into her own as what a British critic called a "Victorianist Iris Murdoch" (which is apt in view of Byatt's critical study, "Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch"). She does so by taking a bleaker and more critical view of the period, especially the great struggle between matter and spirit, faith and science, and showing us, in effect, how the humanists (or at least some of them) lost the war by fighting the wrong battles on the wrong ground.

In fact, these two complementary novellas-which constitute a perfect diptych in contrasting emotional tone and linked themes-show what led to the social and moral collapse documented by Ford Madox Ford in his Tietjens tetralogy, "Parade's End," whose action revolves around the catastrophe of World War I. The comparison is almost inevitable because both works invoke an image of the social order as a kind of huge feudal estate, with, in Christopher Tietjens' semi-ironic words, "The Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English landowner, a benevolently awful duke who never left his study . . . , but knowing all about the estate down to the last hind at the home farm and the last oak. . . ."

In "Morpho Eugenia" (after a species of moth), the longer and more dramatic of the novellas, the landowner is Rev. Harald Alabaster of Bredely Hall, a mere baronet with vague scientific ambitions, though an immensely rich one. A second son, he inherited his title and wealth through the accident of his older brother's childlessness; and his unexpected accession to position has led him to seek in the scientific discoveries of the age some evidence "that it is not impossible that the world is the work of a Creator, a Designer."

Thus, though Alabaster is remotely benevolent, he is far from being assured, awful or omniscient-or even knowledgable-about the creation he rules. And he is particularly ignorant of the continued misconduct of an Adam and Eve in his own household.

As observed by William Adamson, the bankrupt entomologist who shelters in Alabaster's benevolence after a shipwreck has vitiated the 10-year expedition to the Amazon from which he has just returned, "Harald Alabaster was master, but he was, as far the whirring of domestic clocks and wheels went, a deus absconditus, who set it all in motion, and might at a pinch stop it, but had little to do with its use of energy. . . ." Indeed, Sir Harald's own energy, in a profoundly ironic sense, is devoted to writing a book proving his own existence intellectually, although this very preoccupation in it demonstrates the opposite.

An expert on the "social insects," Adamson is well placed for observation by his own nebulous position in the swarming hive of a Victorian country house. He is supposed to sort Sir Harald's hoard of unexamined specimens randomly acquired from scientists around the world while awaiting financing for a new expedition from Alabaster to recoup his losses in the Amazon.

Adamson falls in love with the eldest daughter, Eugenia, a beautiful, mothlike, mysterious figure of tragedy who has been in a sense "widowed" by the suicide of her fiance. And when he eventually marries her, Adamson becomes part of one of those shifting amoeba-like double love triangles in which both Byatt and Murdoch specialize-another component being Matty Crompton, a fellow intellectual limbo-dweller who "makes herself useful" in some unnamed capacity having to do with the swarm of household children, to whom Eugenia and William (or is it William?) add five more in the next three years, including two sets of twins.

All this goes on while William and Matty oversee the children's scientific study of several ant colonies, collecting new evidence of their round-the-clock social efficiency whose documentation, at Matty's prompting, will be the liberation of both William and Matty (the novella's "real" lovers) from Eugenia's evil enchantment.